Salad days as foragers get taste for walks on wild side

The price of salad has rocketed recently, but rather than paying through the nose for a bag of lettuce from the supermarket, increasing numbers of people are heading out to the countryside to forage for a free alternative.

According to Jesper Launder, a wild food expert from Hebden Bridge, the recession has brought a huge new interest in harvesting free food from common land.

Mr Launder says there are rich pickings in the wild for those who know where to look. Sorrel, asparagus and wild garlic are just some of the edible plants growing abundantly on common ground at this time of year.

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While May is traditionally dubbed the "hungry gap" by gardeners, it is also a prime foraging season.

"It's easy to fill a basket with wild salad leaves at this time of year. Choose between wild cress, sorrel, wild garlic, linden or lime. It's as good as anything you can get in the supermarket," he says.

"Yorkshire is a really rich wild food environment. You can go out on a ten minute walk and come back with a great selection of food if you know what you're looking for and where to look."

But to be sure that bunch of cow parsley isn't really a bouquet of deadly hemlock he says it is best to go with a guide. An expert forager will reveal how to identify poisonous plants from edible ones, where the best pickings are, and how to prepare it all for dinner.

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Mr Launder, 37, has been leading mushroom hunts and wild food forays for eight years across Yorkshire. A trained medical herbalist, he has also been sourcing his own wild mushrooms since he was nine. He led a recent food foray at Malham to pass on some of his knowledge.

Even in the car park at the Yorkshire Dales National Park centre, he was able to find bistort, which he described as "a little like spinach". He also identified hairy bittercress nearby, with other plants in the area including Easter dock, nettles, dandelions and goose grass, or "sticky willy", which can all be used for making soups and salads.

An examination of the churchyard revealed sorrel leaves, which have a lemony tang and are prized by top chefs.

Among the other plants in the area were meadow sweet, ground elder and march marigold, along with wild garlic.

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"Wild garlic really is a superb native ingredient, you can use the leaves to make soup or you can use the stems a little like spring onion," says Mr Launder. "You can pickle the bulbs like capers."

One of the walkers, Sylvia Watson, from Leeds, said she was surprised by the number of edible plants. "I feel like I can try things that I might have been nervous about before."

The new interest in wild food is even bringing plants which have long been shunned as weeds – such as nettles and dandelions – to the dinner table.

"As a quality food, nettles are exceptional," says Mr Launder. "They far exceed a lot of the greens that you can buy in the supermarket in terms of their mineral content and are incredibly rich in vitamin C. You would pay really good money for them in a supermarket."

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Even invasive weeds such as Japanese knotweed are being served up as a delicacy. "Although you wouldn't want to introduce it into your garden, Japanese knotweed is an excellent wild food.

"The young shoots can be used like rhubarb and you can make a crumble out of it.

"Dandelion is another really valuable plant. You can make a wine out of the flowers. The leaves can be used in a salad. The flower heads can be pickled like capers and the roots can be roasted."

The keen interest in locally sourced and seasonal products has spawned a new industry in professional foraging for restaurants. The Mountain Food Company in Pembrokeshire, Wales, is one of a number of firms which sift through estuaries, hedgerows and mountainsides in search of ingredients for Michelin-starred chefs.

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But is there a danger of plundering these natural resources? Mr Launder says that from a practical perspective, foragers should only take a little of each plant they see growing wild. Local by-laws vary from region to region, but it is illegal to take the root of any plant growing in the wild. While he would not recommend harvesting from somewhere such as the Yorkshire Dales National Park, urban areas are a safe bet.